Something happened during the 2008 Presidential elections. White men and women voted in larger numbers than ever before for an African American candidate. When Tom Bradley and Jesse Jackson ran for office in the 1980s, pollsters noticed a troubling trend. Not wanting to appear racist, a cross-section of Whites told researchers that they supported African American politicians, but when a statistically significant number got into the voting booth they pulled the lever beside the White candidate's name. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the so-called Bradley effect seemed to lose its edge as White voters, especially the young and better educated, said they would vote for Barack Obama and they did. While race played a bigger factor in the general election than it did in the primaries, there was not a massive election-day defection of White voters to John McCain and the Republican side.Footnote ¹

This change in electoral behavior had something to do with the eight long years of the Bush presidency, the shaky basis for the war in Iraq, the souring economy, and with Obama himself, his rousing rhetoric and tremendous political skills. But in another important way, it stemmed from the growing desire for some in the United States, especially middle and upper-middle-class Whites, to present themselves as colorblind, and show that for them race no longer mattered. By voting for Obama, in other words, some Whites tried to suggest that they had transcended race and that the issue no longer mattered to them, that they had achieved a kind of enlightened state of color-blindness. Yet Obama's apparent Blackness remained crucial in this staging. For those seeking the appearance of colorblindness, the easiest way to show others that you had moved beyond race in the political realm was to vote for an African American (or Latino or Asian) candidate. Race doesn't matter, race matters.

This dynamic of desired colorblindness doesn't just play out in politics. It is perhaps even more strongly and consistently expressed in what we buy. Starbucks, something of a fallen corporate star these days, began its ascent to the top of the commercial heap just as the appeal of colorblindness spread. From the 1980s onward, the company understood quite clearly the upper-middle-class desire to demonstrate, to perform, that race didn't matter for them. And the coffee company, like so many others other chains, used race to, somewhat ironically, make this point and sell lattes.

Several years ago, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (Reference Hall2005) called on scholars to study, what she called, the “long civil rights movement.” She urged them to examine the struggles for racial equality that ensued before Brown, and before Montgomery, and those that took place outside the boundaries of the legally segregated South. Historians and sociologists have been quick to respond to Hall, uncovering the deep roots and broad swath of Civil Rights protest in the United States in the twentieth century.Footnote ² So far, however, they have not yet taken the story very far past the mid-1970s or outside the formal realm of politics. Understanding the growing appeal of colorblindness can, as Michele Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle (Reference Micheletti and Stolle2007) show in their study of the anti-sweatshop campaigns, help to do that just that. The selling of this idea demonstrates the intensifying politicization of buying. But like every marketable desire and political idea, the notion of colorblindness and its hold on people has a history.

Just after World War II, Gunnar Myrdal ([1944], Reference Myrdal1996) published his detailed and revelatory study, An American Dilemma. White prejudice, the Swedish economist concluded, resulted in discrimination against African Americans and the distortion of the American Creed of melting-pot equality. By the 1960s, Myrdal's ideas were increasingly out of favor. While Civil Rights activists talked about changing the hearts and minds of Whites, after Little Rock, most were not holding their collective breath for this to happen. They sought to change the law first. Pushed by sit-ins at lunch counters and Easter Sunday marches across bridges, Congress ended legal segregation in 1965. Over the next few years, the Black Power Movement emerged and questioned the wisdom of integration and even more, the essential decency of America, but it faded from the headlines by the mid-1970s. As it did, an updated version of Myrdal's faith in the America Creed and the impact of discrimination took shape in the mainstream press, marketing departments, and suburban living rooms.Footnote ³

Few Neo-Mydralians would have said that the country had fulfilled its founding promises or that it had cashed that check that Martin Luther King, Jr. had talked about in 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial. But in the post-Civil Rights moment, especially in “creative class” circles, to use Richard Florida's (Reference Florida2002) apt term for Starbucks' early adopters, the dream focused increasingly on that single line from King's speech where he looked forward to the day that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. As this became the benchmark for race relations, the problem was no longer the law or deeply entrenched and unfair economic or social structures, it was personal prejudice, the wrong-headed thinking by some that race mattered, and that it explained differences in human behavior and individual actions.

Universalism, and its twin, colorblindness ruled the day in the post-civil rights era with many White Americans insisting that race didn't matter, but racism did. Recalling Myrdal, racism, in this view, was posed as a moral issue rather than a political one; it was seen as a personal failing, even a sign of backwardness rather than a civic issue or the culmination of tenacious and exclusionary historical forces.Footnote ⁴ Once people changed how they thought, once they got rid of their out-dated views, society would move forward, no political intervention (Obama, for his part, promised few advances when it came to Civil Rights) or new laws or social change necessary. Yet once the civil rights struggle shifted from marches and rallies to private thoughts and attitudes, the question became, how could you show that you were moral and modern? How could you demonstrate your lack of prejudice, and that for you, race didn't matter? Quite often, to show how you felt, race mattered. Hence the importance to some, though certainly not all, of a vote for an African American presidential candidate and shopping at a chain store that talked about diversity.Footnote ⁵

Researchers for urbanspoon.com discovered that Obama ran strongest in areas with a high density of Starbucks stores (Ethan 2008).Footnote ⁶ Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Like a vote, for some, for Obama, Starbucks provided its customers with a quiet, indeed everyday, way to symbolically show—to others and to themselves—that they adhered to the ethnos of colorblindness, that race didn't matter. And this performance is not only about the desire for colorblindness, but also about the changing nature of the state, civic life, and consumerism, and shifting conceptions of class and status.

Starbucks' racial politics—really the staging of racial politics—share a lot in common with the Gap's well-known and examined Product RED campaign to combat AIDS in Africa. As commentators have noted, by donating a portion of its proceeds to the less fortunate, the clothier created a way for middle-class consumers (and their emulators) to get what they wanted and to look good at the same time (Eikenberry Reference Eikenberry2009; Nickel and Eikenberry, Reference Nickel and Eikenberry2009). Cause marketing, as Naomi Klein (Reference Klein2000) and others have noted, is the result of the alarming spread of brands and buying into just about every corner of daily life. But even more is at work here. To be sure, hefty doses of buying, advertising, and marketing certainly weren't new to America in 1995 or 2005 (Barber Reference Barber2007; Klein Reference Klein2000). Neither was the branding of everything from fun-runs to urinal covers to rock concerts. Nor was the commodification of consumers' deepest anxieties, desires, and aspirations all that new. It wasn't even that Americans suffered, in business writer Lucas Conley's (Reference Conley2008) telling phrase, from “obsessive branding disorder.” What's new, and what makes our current world so susceptible to the seductions of buying and promises of brands, is the withering of nonmarket relationships and the public institutions, like clubs, neighborhood associations, trade unions, and broad-based Civil Rights organizations, that in the past had pushed back against the market and marketers to challenge them for people's allegiances and identities.Footnote ⁷ The pullback of community, the state, and other binding agents, leading to the rise of neoliberalism, as Samantha King (Reference King2006) discusses in her key book on breast cancer and the policy of philanthropy, allowed brands like Starbucks to sell more goods and garner greater profits by reaching deeper into our consciousness and claiming spaces that civic institutions, including government agencies and activist networks, occupied in the past.Footnote ⁸ The point here, however, is not so much to debate the merits of consumption as a form of politics, but rather to point out that there are increasingly fewer avenues of formal political expression outside of buying to say something about our ideas and ourselves. Because of this change, the marketplace has emerged as the best place to understand current political beliefs and everyday desires and examine how they get articulated and expressed.

Starbucks, then, sold customers political ideas and ideals, including the notion of colorblindness. Because it does this, it offers scholars a way to see how this conception of race operated, what it did and didn't do, what it said and didn't say about contemporary America. Shopping with a company that plays African American music, produces movies about inner-city African American spelling-bee champs, hires African American executives, opens stores in historically African American neighborhoods, and welcomes African American consumers is, in the eyes of many, a way to show that for them, race doesn't matter. But of course, race did matter in the corporate coffeehouse, just as it did with Obama. The presence of African Americans both literally and figuratively at Starbucks was meant to highlight that race didn't matter. Really this is a performance—what we might call, the performance of colorblindness. In these productions, Whites need people of color on the stage (or in the background) to demonstrate that they don't care about race. Access to this production had value, emotional and status value; so people went out of the way to get it and paid extra to have it.

In order to better understand the value of appearing to be colorblind, of supposedly not seeing race (but using symbolic racial associations to do so), in the age of state atrophy and ‘bowling alone’ and to pull together rarely connected scholarly literatures on status making, civil rights, state building, and the meaning of consumption, I look, then, in this essay at Starbucks—at its diversity policies and its customers. I have done so by combining interviews with patrons and workers, ethnographies at hundreds of stores in cities and suburbs across the United States and the world, and countless voter surveys, company brochures and advertisements, posts on on-line messaging sites, and newspaper and magazine reports.Footnote ⁹ Again the focus here is on Starbucks, but not so much because Starbucks is unique, but because it is typical of, and even epitomizes, the current economic order, where companies sell symbolic desires and readily-consumed solutions to social problems. Over the last twenty years, as faith in politics has declined and corporate control has usurped chunks of state authority, we increasingly buy things to feel better about ourselves and our place in the world and to show off our discernment and sophistication. That is one of the chief reasons why consumers pay a premium for Cherry Garica at Ben and Jerry's, organic arugula at Whole Foods, and fair trade coffee at a Magic Johnson Starbucks. Doing good makes people look good and we pay—again and again—for this appearance, even if our actions don't solve the problems they are meant to address.

*****

Diversity isn't simply a stage prop at Starbucks, or some sort of mirage. Where diverse people live, in city centers and inner-ring suburbs, Starbucks draws diverse crowds and that is part of the brand's appeal. On a research trip to New York, I walked into the 4000 square foot Starbucks store on Astor Place with Marc Gobé. Dressed from head to toe in various shades of black, the French-born author and President, CEO, and Executive Creative Director of Desgrippes Gobé Group, a New York-based company ranked by marketing experts as “one of the world's top ten brand image creative firms,” scanned the room and smiled. “Look at this place,” he said waving his arms. “There is … a Black person.” “Over there, look, there are a couple of Russians.” Young Asian students sat in a corner on a small stage under a line of theater lights. Two African American men huddled around a table with a White woman laughing as they read something. In line stood a gray-haired woman in Birkenstocks holding the hand of a dark skinned pre-schooler. Behind her, two blond-haired, blue-eyed businessmen talked about commercial real estate prices as they waited for coffee. On the other side of the store, a messy student in thrift-store pants and a vintage checked shirt sat next to a boho chic woman in a gauzy skirt and beaded blouse talking on a rhinestone-studded pink cell phone. On a corner couch a mixed-race gay couple giggled as they filled out the New York Times crossword puzzle. “It's great isn't it,” Gobé said as we walked out of the store.

The diversity that excited Gobé, and gave Starbucks value to him, is not just a New York thing. At the Starbucks in Bala Cynwood, a stop on a Main Line train route going west out of Philadelphia, African American salesmen in snappy suits stand in front of orthodox Jews with tallit peeking out from under their white shirts waiting to give their orders to a jowly, older French-speaking barista. In Camden Town, a gritty, hipster section in north London, all kinds of people passed through the store—men and women from Germany, France, the Caribbean, the Asian subcontinent, Africa, Ireland, and even England.

Starbucks workers are perhaps even more diverse than the customers. I have met Russian, African American, Latino, Asian, Arab, South Island Pacific, and Turkish blue-haired Gen Xers, bass players in garage bands, linguistic graduate students, aspiring actors, and one-time radicals who have worked behind the counter serving coffee and muffins. I even met a Mormon employee once. She won't do an on-the-record interview with me because she didn't want her devout parents to know that she made money pushing coffee.

The diversity at Starbucks reflects, in part, the growing diversity of the United States. Latinos now make up roughly thirteen percent of the country's population—slightly less than the number of African Americans. Almost one in twenty Americans, meanwhile, comes from Asia. Growing numbers of immigrants from Africa and India, Egypt and Israel, Poland and Ukraine and everywhere in between arrive in the United States every year. Although it is hard to know for sure, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people account for at least ten percent of the population and certainly that many Starbucks customers.

But Starbucks' diversity is more than just a reflection of the changing make-up of America. Growing competition has forced business people to crunch numbers in new ways. Gay, lesbian, and transgendered people spend more than half a trillion dollars a year. African American and Latino consumption adds up to two, maybe three times that number. These are big pieces of the pie. Pointing to the United States' changing demographics, Marc Gobé (Reference Gobé2001) writes, “people want to deal with corporations that are responsive to their unique needs” (pp. 29–30). Harvard Business School Professor David A. Thomas (Reference Thomas2004) studied IBM and noted how the corporate powerhouse “expanded minority markets dramatically by promoting diversity in its own workforce” (p. 98).Footnote ¹⁰

Following its own instincts and maybe the advice of Thomas, Gobé, and other experts, Starbucks and lots of other companies have aggressively gone after non-White, non-heterosexual markets. In the press, Starbucks, again like other corporations, has insisted that this was about more than sales and revenues. Early in its corporate life, Starbucks formulated a mission statement and vowed to do everything it could “to establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining uncompromising principles as we grow.” To help its employees “measure the appropriateness of our decisions,” the company laid out six guiding principles. Number two instructs Starbucks workers at all levels to “embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.”Footnote ¹¹ Over time, this has remained central to the company's self-definition and its marketing pitch. In 2004, David Pace, a public relations representative with the firm, told a reporter, “You will see diversity by age, sex, race, sexual orientation, family status throughout the organization. It holds an equal place in our guiding principles, just like respect and dignity, just like customer satisfaction” (Fellner Reference Fellner2004).

At Starbucks, this isn't just talk. Like IBM, the coffee company went after minority business through concrete, tangible acts. Supporting its commitments, it laid out a global diversity strategy, focusing on employment, suppliers, and customers. Each year, as part of this, the company goes looking for new executive talent at Howard, Morehouse, Spellman, and other historically Black colleges and universities. The efforts have paid off. In 2005, minorities and women made up sixty percent of Starbucks' workforce. Many of these people obviously worked behind the counter, but not all. Of the company's eleven-member board of directors two were women and two were people of color. Women made up twenty-four percent of the company's top corporate officers. For all executives—vice presidents and above—the total representation by women was thirty-one percent. For people of color, it was thirteen percent. “This is quite above the average for other Fortune 500 companies, which is about fifteen percent for women and about three to five percent for people of color,” boasted May Swonden, Starbucks' vice-president of global diversity and herself an African American woman; “Our record is one we are quite proud of” (Forsythe Reference Forsythe2005).

Starbucks' supplier program represents another of the company's diversity efforts. Under the plan, the firm reached out to minority- and women-owned businesses for cups, cleaning, and carpets. Each year between 2000 and 2005, Starbucks doubled its spending with these groups. By 2005, it bought $140 million worth of materials annually from such firms. “Women- and minority-owned businesses have always had a difficult time getting their foot in the door,” May Snowden explained, “But what we have found is that, when we give them a chance to do business with us, they are very productive, efficient and nimble—and they bring a high value to our company once they are engaged” (Forsythe Reference Forsythe2005). Snowden claimed that the supplier program would generate ripples. “So many of the women- and minority-owned small businesses we hire … turn around and hire more people of color and more women to build their businesses. Achieving that cascading effect is one of the core goals we have as a corporation” (Forsythe Reference Forsythe2005).

Magic Johnson smiled that big radiant smile of his as he shook hands with community leaders under a Starbucks sign. Next to him stood Howard Schultz, the driving force behind Starbucks during its boom years. He, too, was all smiles. This scene got repeated again and again. Beginning in 1998, Starbucks entered into a 50/50 partnership with the Johnson Development Corporation and established the carefully named, Urban Coffee Opportunities (UCO). Starbucks' highly publicized deal with Johnson brought coffeehouses, in the coffee company's words, to “ethnically diverse urban and suburban neighborhoods.” Between 1998 and 2007, UCO Starbucks stores would open in Harlem, South Central Los Angeles, and on the edge of the neighborhood where Martin Luther King grew up in Atlanta. According May Snowden, in 2005, the UCO stores produced $17.5 million in annual salaries, wages, and benefits in underserved, primarily African American communities. The presence of a Starbucks store, Snowden added, served as “a catalyst for other business development in a community, as well as an inviting place to work and enjoy conversation and coffee” (Forsythe Reference Forsythe2005).

Diversity figures into Starbucks' advertising as well. Copying from Benetton posters, Starbucks brochures feature a multicultural rainbow of people—Black and Asian baristas standing next to White and Latino customers. Posters show White men serving Black women or picture café tables surrounded by J. Crew-model-handsome people of all shades and colors. During the 1990s, when Starbucks was getting set to launch a book series to raise money to support child literacy programs, a former company marketer told me that he was instructed by a higher-up to make sure to include some young people of color in the pictures.Footnote ¹²

Starbucks' diversity efforts have not gone unnoticed. In 2005, Essence magazine named it one the “great places to work for African American women” (Gayney Reference Gayney2007). That same year, the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equity Index singled out the company for its continuing commitment to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities. Also in 2005, Diversity Inc. magazine listed Starbucks among its “26 Notable Companies for Diversity.” In 2007, Starbucks remained on the Diversity Inc. notable list, but slipped off the chart a year later. This probably says less about Starbucks than it does about the company's typical-ness. Most Fortune 500 companies are committed to diversity in some ways. This is both a corporate value, and an expectation of corporate consumers.

On the ground, at the store level, Starbucks' diversity strategies seem to work as well. Starbucks consistently attracts a decent percentage of people of color at its retail outlets. According to a company official, at the turn of the last century, sixteen percent of Starbucks customers were people of color. Five years later, he told me, the coffee company counted people of color as a third of all of its customers.Footnote ¹³ In an interesting twist, Starbucks, even in majority White areas, tends to attract a more diverse clientele than most of its independent coffeehouse rivals.Footnote ¹⁴ Many of the Magic Johnson stores, moreover, are also a hit. Before the siren came to the inner-city, the basketball star explained, “We'd drive anywhere to get a cup of Starbucks, but now we have it in our own communities, and that's why our numbers have been so high… you can't even get in the door from 6:00 am to 10:00 am” (Chun Reference Chun1998).

Johnson might have exaggerated a bit, but most of the UCO stores I visited drew steady crowds. On a picture perfect Los Angeles Sunday morning, I went to a Starbucks not far from the corner of the Florence and Normandy—the site of the fiercest violence during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Customers filled every table and chair. Older men and women pecked away at computers and read newspapers. Families, dressed up for church, stopped in for bagels and donuts, coffee and chocolate milk. Teens sat outside on the porch, sipping iced coffees and playing with their phones (Chun Reference Chun1998).

Several days before Christmas on the first morning of the 2005 New York City transit strike, I went with a reporter to the Starbucks on West 125^th Street in the heart of Harlem. No UCO store opened to more fanfare than this one in America's most famous African American neighborhood. Howard Schultz and Magic Johnson showed up and talked about corporate caring and the economic boost their coffee shop would provide the area, even though the community was already gentrifying (Hyra Reference Hyra2008; Jackson Reference Jackson2003). On the day that I went I ordered a grande-sized drip coffee and so did my companion. We had planned to stay for awhile and check out the scene, but at first we couldn't find seats. We waited—two White guys with shoulder bags and cloth coats—plastered against the wall near the milk dispensers. Each time someone needed some half and half or a packet of sugar we would slide over even tighter into the corner. “Then,” as the reporter tells it, “an African American man in overalls sitting near the window got up and approached. ‘There's a chair right here, and a chair right there,’ the man said, pointing at a couple of empty seats at a round table. ‘Come on, it's a community thing’” (McGrath Reference McGrath2006). We joined an elderly woman and sat for an hour. The whole time we were there, every single seat in the store was taken with neighborhood folks and tourists—many with German accents. Diversity was apparently paying off for Starbucks.

*****

Following my Harlem trip, I started to think more about Starbucks and diversity. As I did, I was having trouble making complete sense of the company's policies. It certainly did do good things when it came to using minority suppliers and hiring and opening stores with Magic Johnson (Lury Reference Lury, Franklin, Lury and Stacey2000). But was that all? Was there a larger agenda here? I thought about whether cultivating diversity had a pay-off beyond attracting new markets and new consumers in African American neighborhoods? What, if anything, did upper-middle class Whites—Starbucks' core audience—get out of these moves? How did race matter to Starbucks? How did Starbucks' diversity moves fit with the larger politics of buying and race in America?

Prompting many of these questions was the Harlem store itself. This is the dingiest Starbucks I have ever visited. While it is by no means typical of other UCO stores, it had few of the amenities of a Manhattan or Bala Cynwood store. There were no cushy chairs or leather couches or gas fireplaces. No nooks or crannies for reading or getting together with friends or holding a meeting. This was just a bland rectangle. The floors were worn out, the tables wobbled, and the baristas didn't even play music. Usually Starbucks stores have a bright, airy feel. The Harlem store designers, however, skipped the signature floor to ceiling windows, opting instead for what people in their business would recognize as a defensive architecture of lots of brick and only tiny openings.

Again while the store is not typical, I began to see it primarily as a message-sending device. In this way, the fact that the store was there was more important than the physical space itself. It was, in a sense, an advertisement, perhaps for Harlem and the fact that it was gentrifying (itself a contentious and complex issue), but even more it was a Starbucks self-promotion. Its presence served as a way for Starbucks to communicate what it believed, or what it believed its customers believed, about race in America. So the Starbucks store in Harlem was only partially about Harlem. Symbolically, it served the needs and desires of suburbanites in Westchester and on Long Island. It wasn't just about Black urbanites and earning Black dollars; it was also about White racial politics and White dollars.

You could hear the echoes of this—of race doesn't matter, race matters—from the beginning. When the Harlem store opened, Magic Johnson and Howard Schultz were there talking about the meaning of the store (Kuntman Reference Kuntman1999a, b; Ramirez Reference Ramirez1999).Footnote ¹⁵ From the start, this was an odd partnership, but not for obvious reasons. As a kid, Schultz played basketball on Brooklyn's asphalt courts and he used to play pick-up—and he liked to tell reporters this—a couple of times a week. After the coffee business made him a fabulously rich man, he bought a stake, which he has since sold, in the NBA's Seattle Supersonics. The two smiling businessmen had, Schultz insisted however, more than basketball in common. “When Earvin and I first met,” the Starbucks chairman told a reporter, using the name that Johnson prefers and that his oldest and closest friends call him, “there were lots of similarities in how we grew up. I would characterize it as growing up on the other side of the tracks” (Garcia Reference Garcia2005).

What was Schultz saying here? Not many people where I grew up—in a racially divided town in South Jersey—would characterize things this way. Railroad tracks run right down the middle of my hometown, Vineland, New Jersey. Here and in most places, those tracks divided White families from Black and Latino families. Still Schultz persisted, “Earvin and I had a natural connection about the values of the working class. And when we talked about the vision of opening Starbucks together in underserved communities, it was a natural connection” (Garcia Reference Garcia2005). Ever since they got out of the “projects”—Schultz's word for the largely all-White federally-funded public housing complex where he grew up and the modest single-family house where Johnson was raised—the two of them wanted, the coffee king maintained, to “give something back.”Footnote ¹⁶ What Schultz didn't talk about was race, because the store in Harlem and the narratives he constructed, were built to suggest that race didn't matter, but of course it did as his coded language about tracks and projects suggested.

When Johnson's turn came to speak, he didn't talk about growing up poor or his “natural” connection with Schultz. He spoke about race and how it definitely mattered and how it shaped city landscapes and urban opportunities. After retiring from basketball, Johnson explained, he went into business—the business of getting rich and the related business of racial uplift. When he discussed his corporate life, he talked more about economic self-empowerment than brotherhood and sounded more like Malcolm X than a soundbite Martin Luther King or Howard Schultz. He wanted equality of access and equality of opportunity to spend. Integration and universalism didn't figure a lot into his vision. Unlike some diversity supporters, Johnson didn't draw pictures of Whites and Blacks sitting together over lattes. He was looking for places for under-stored, middle- and upper-income African Americans to go to and get quality, status-conferring goods. “Companies,” he noted with race clearly on his mind, “still have that fear of coming into minority communities” (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2006). National brands could turn a profit in city spaces dominated by people of color, because as explained, not everyone there was poor and without money. But, he continued, the companies would have to deliver “high quality products.” “I'm about making money,” Johnson said without apologizing, “making sure urban America gets the retail they deserve and need.” African Americans, he concluded, “want brands, just like suburban America wants, and they don't mind paying for it, so long as it's the best in class” (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2006).

Asked about his hopes for the areas around the UCO stores, he answered striking another chord of Black Nationalism over Myrdalian inspired colorblindness, “I'd want to see more business here in this community—that means more jobs for this community—and more social income being spent in this community. That means that the dollar is being recycled within the community and that is how the community grows” (Garcia Reference Garcia2005).Footnote ¹⁷

To get the cycle stared, Johnson reached out to corporate America with a new product. On one level, he sold them middle-class Black customers. African Americans, he repeatedly told executives, have money to spend, but nowhere to spend it. Implicitly he also touched on Thorstein Veblen (Reference Veblen2008) and some of the changes going on in urban America. African Americans, he suggested, wanted to show off their growing incomes through a little everyday conspicuous consumption, the very heart of Starbucks' value proposition everywhere. Open outlets “on the other side of the tracks” and provide a few jobs, and you will, Johnson promised, find a sturdy base of people with money to spend.

Sony listened, Burger King listened, TGIF listened, Loews Theaters listened, and eventually so did Howard Schultz. Magic Johnson did his PR part, a part that subtlely commodified Black culture—and really Black people—for Whites looking for ways to perform colorblindness. (This is perhaps what it took to get investment dollars in underserved corners of the country.) To do this, Johnson paid Schultz back the way the CEO probably wanted to be paid back. At the opening ceremonies for the Harlem store, he told a pack of reporters, “Starbucks is being very courageous” (Kuntman Reference Kuntman1999b).Footnote ¹⁸

Still Johnson said in other settings, in words that Schultz and others in search of the appearance of colorblindness would not dare utter out loud, that race mattered. “We don't eat scones,” he told a Chicago reporter. “We try to serve the pound cake and some things that we eat and we like. It's a little sweeter” (Spielman Reference Spielman2004) Johnson said.

Schultz and the other business people who followed Johnson's lead, no doubt, wanted Black business. But that wasn't the only thing on their agendas. As much as they wanted urban dollars, they wanted affirmation from Magic Johnson and identification with Magic Johnson. His stamp of approval demonstrated that for these companies race didn't matter (at least as long as profits remained high). Corporate-engineered colorblindness had value to the company's core audience of well-paid and educated Whites, and surely to some African American customers as well.

Sometimes, though, Starbucks let slip that race mattered, that not everyone shared the same histories, and that as a result, we might not be exactly alike. Typically Starbucks doesn't franchise. To ensure predictability, it opens stores by itself and owns them outright. But in foreign countries it operates a little differently. Looking for help with tax and planning policies as well as local folk- and foodways, the coffee giant teams up with an established retail partner from that part of the world. In France and Spain it entered into a joint venture with the European food and retail conglomerate, Groupo VIPS. In Japan and China, Starbucks partnered with similar companies. The one U.S. exception to this rule was the UCO stores. Starbucks formed a partnership with the Magic Johnson Development Corporation, presumably paying for its expertise and understanding of how Black folks consumed. Through this arrangement, Starbucks hinted, but of course never said, that it saw inner-city Black and Latino areas as akin to foreign territories. It was, at least, a tacit admission that race still mattered, that something more than simple prejudice divided us. Even when it attracted middle-class African American customers, Starbucks seemed to be saying it didn't fully know what they wanted.

Helped along by the media, many suburban Americans view places like Harlem through the same lenses as Starbucks—as virtual foreign lands. They often imagine the world of the urban—the code word that Starbucks and others use for economically distressed Black worlds—as not quite fully integrated into the United States. If the urban world is a world apart, Starbucks, then, becomes an agent of retail civilization, bringing the benefits of the modern world to a backward place. How else would a creative class type describe a place in 2005 without a Starbucks? The very absence of a Starbucks marked a place as outside the higher-end of the mainstream.

Given these assumptions, then, Starbucks and its customers view “urban” America through updated, and maybe softer, but still tinted colonial lenses. Neither the coffee company nor its loyal patrons see themselves as hard-edged imperialists, and nor should they. Yet there remains a trace of Rudyard Kipling's “The White Man's Burden” in bringing upscale coffee shops to Harlem and South Central Los Angeles.

For Kipling, White men, rather than the “captives,” remained the focus of the imperial conquests he wanted to inspire. He wrote his verse to lure the United States into expansion. The colonizers, in his view, bound their sons to exile to grow markets and gain economic advantages, but that's not what they told themselves. Colonialism, Kipling and other ideologues knew, delivered an added psychological pay-off. Western men insisted that they journeyed to Pacific islands and the Green Hills of Africa to help, not simply to extract cheap raw materials and monopolize markets, but also to introduce civilization to these overwhelming not-White, far-flung places. This narrative transformed the colonizers from crass, market-driven men into kind-hearted, yet still powerful, benefactors.

The idea of the White man's burden is perhaps overblown in Starbucks' case. Most Starbucks customers didn't see Harlem residents as sullen children, but there is a parallel between the racialization—race matters—of imperial efforts and Starbucks' imagining of urban America as not quite the same as the rest of the nation. And there is also a parallel about who benefits. Both Starbucks and Kipling emphasize the giver as well as the receiver. Starbucks came to Harlem, Compton, and Seattle's Central Area to make money. But the stores also represent a gift—a gift of consumer opportunities and everyday luxury—that the firm gives to Black people. To give a gift, you must have something to give, but you get, as the giver, something back as well. In this case, Starbucks gained a competitive advantage by opening in areas identified as urban, when not all companies would do, as well as the moral capital earned in contemporary America by lending a helping hand and by saying that race doesn't matter.Footnote ¹⁹ As it made these moves, the company distinguished itself and its customers from other brands, if not in reality but through marketing insistence, positioning itself as a tolerant, yet still successful company that cared about diversity and the promotion of equal opportunity. Here race matters, it just remains unspoken.

Howard Schultz played his part in the staging of the race doesn't matter, race matters narrative Starbucks sells. There is a Starbucks store at the bottom of the CEO's Seattle office. There is another one down the street and a couple more within easy walking distance. But Schultz regularly drove visiting journalists a few miles away going past African American churches, soul food restaurants, and dollar stores to the Starbucks at 23^rd and Jackson. This was the part of town where Ray Charles first started to blend pop sounds with gospel and Quincy Jones learned his jazz chops. Well into the postwar years, it remained the heart of Black Seattle, both the center of the city's African American community and the place where African immigrants settled. This was also where the urban crisis of the 1960s hit the hardest. By the 1980s, however, the forces of gentrification had moved in, bringing with them middle-class African Americans and a smattering of Whites. Yet the area remained in the 1990s, “under-stored,” that is, without many chain stores.

Opened in 1997, this pre-Magic Johnson deal Starbucks store—it started selling coffee before the establishment of the UCO partnership—features a mural of well-known local African American jazz players on the wall and attracts a steady stream of Ethiopian-born cab-drivers and older African American men from the neighborhood to a rectangular library table in the front. A multiracial cast of businessmen and students sit at the other tables. Unlike the Harlem store, this is a comfortable kidney-shaped coffeehouse with hardwood floors, hanging colored glass lights, and cushy couches. The only evidence of the defensive architecture of upper Manhattan was at the bathroom door. Like at a lot of Starbucks, it was locked and you needed to get a key from a manager to get in.Footnote ²⁰

On his visits to the 23^rd and Jackson store, Schultz walked into the store, shaking hands with workers and nodding at customers. While sitting at a table sipping an espresso, he told stories to visiting reporters. Of course, these are edited accounts meant to enhance the brand. The site, and what he said and didn't say, mattered. He didn't discuss why it took African American community leaders two years to convince him to open the store where he sits nor how the forces of gentrification had been underway before Starbucks got there (Torres Reference Torres2004). One time, Schultz whisked a British journalist over to the “Black bottom” store in his Porsche Cayenne. After they finished their coffee, the chief executive took his guest outside and pointed to the Hollywood Video and Wallgreens pharmacy in the strip mall behind his coffee shop and pronounced, “After we put this store in, all these other national chains came in” (The New York Times 2004).

Even as Schultz took some credit for the neighborhood's renewal, he didn't say anything to the reporter about race or diversity or why he chose to visit this particular store. But this is not a man, as anyone who has met him will tell you, who acts without thinking. Surely he went to this racially diverse Starbucks in this historically African American neighborhood to send a message; he wanted, it seemed, to tell the middle-class consumers reading those newspaper and magazine profiles about him about Starbucks' connections to urban America. That is also why he shows up for the openings of Magic Johnson stores, even though he rarely comes to other openings (except in foreign countries). Every once in a while, though, Schultz does talk directly about his company's urban initiatives. He told Seattle Times business reporter Tamara Fitzgerald that the partnership with Magic Johnson represented an opportunity for the company to make money, but also he added, with an unknowing nod to Kipling, “most importantly, [to] show some benevolence and give back” (Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald1999).Footnote ²¹

*****

White Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are not prejudiced. In 2005, more than three quarters of all Americans said they supported integration. This represents a major longterm shift. In 1958, eighty percent of Whites said they would move if an African American family bought a house in their neighborhood. Almost forty years later, when asked about segregation, seven out of ten Whites said that they thought it was a “bad thing.” A strong majority also said that African Americans should be able to live where they wanted to and work wherever they could get a job. Even larger numbers of eighteen to twenty-nine year olds support the idea of racial and social equality. Over seventy percent said they would attend a concert where they would be the only person of their race. The same percentage said that they would date someone of a different race and that they would not have a negative opinion of a relative or friend if they dated someone of a different race. Ninety-three percent of Whites under thirty said they would vote for an African American for President (Bobo and Smith, Reference Bobo, Smith, Katkin, Landsman and Tyree1998; Cashin Reference Cashin2004; Hamilton College 1999; Schuman et al. Reference Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan1997). And many did, it seems. In just about every statistical category—from White men between forty-five and sixty-four, to White households earning more than $200,000—Obama outperformed John Kerry and Al Gore (Silver Reference Silver2009). In a smart and comprehensive overview of the 2008 election, political scientists Andrew Gelman and John Sides (Reference Gelman and Sides2009) conclude that, “Racial prejudice, to the extent that it was operating, may not have altered electoral college math very much.” Yet these researchers are quick to add that their study found that for eleven percent of the electorate Obama's race was a reason to vote against him, but for roughly three times that number, Obama's race was a reason to vote for him (Gelman and Sides, Reference Gelman and Sides2009; Mas and Moretti, Reference Mas and Moretti2009; Silver Reference Silver2009).

While some clearly vote for diversity, an even greater number condemn intolerance.Footnote ²² Whites overwhelmingly favor, for instance, strong civil rights protections and stiff penalties for hate crimes. In the press, moreover, nothing stirs a rebuke like a mean-spirited or inappropriate remark. Just ask Jimmy the Greek or Don Imus or Michael Richards. The majority will not tolerate public intolerance.Footnote ²³

The social and economic groups who frequent Starbucks tend to support diversity efforts the strongest. According to its own research, the coffee company's customers are generally better educated and younger than the general population, though the brand has been going more middle-brow over the last couple of decades. According to a company insider, the average income of a Starbucks customer fell from $81,000 per year in 2002 to $55,000 in 2008. Still, the majority of latte drinkers went to college and earned well above the national average.Footnote ²⁴ In 1997, to put a finer grain on this point, a group of consumer researchers discovered that “diversity” was the “defining idea” for teen and twenty-something GenXers. Few, it seems, abandoned this core perspective as they went to college and got out in the job market. In his study of the “creative class,” geographer Richard Florida (Reference Florida2002) found deep respect for the idea of tolerance. “Diversity,” he writes of the journalists, university professors, IT-specialists, and artists he interviewed, “is something they value in all of its manifestations” (p. 79). Given a choice to work in a city with a rainbow of different races or one without, well-educated women and men, he found, will pick the diverse city almost every time. They would even take a pay cut. Again and again he points to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. They are, according to Florida's research, the nation's least diverse big cities and have for years been losing MDs and PhDs. If these rustbelt cities want growth, Florida recommends, they need to encourage tolerance and openness. What Florida's research uncovered, then, was a very strong desire for diversity amongst higher earners and multiple degree-holders (Klein Reference Klein2000). Not surprisingly the young and better educated also gave Obama his strongest support. While the forty-something, Yale-trained lawyer and Illinois Senator won fifty-three percent of the overall vote, he garnered sixty-six percent of voters age eighteen to twenty-nine years old and fifty-eight percent of voters with postgraduate degrees (Silver Reference Silver2009).

The same emotional and status value of diversity that helped Obama with some voters crops up in other places in the United States, including at Starbucks. The data, on this front, however, is more anecdotal, but adds up quickly. When a wealthy advertising executive with Mayflower ancestry dropped his daughter off for her freshman year at a private New England college, he noticed a sad look on her face. “What's wrong?” he asked. “This place has no diversity,” she lamented (Gill Reference Gill2007, p. 42). The dad, Michael Gates Gill, didn't understand why this would trouble her. But that was before everything changed. After years of fat paychecks and steady promotions, Gill got laid off. From there, things spiraled out of control for him. Near rock bottom, he needed a job and got one serving coffee at Starbucks. His first supervisor was an African American woman, a double first for him. He had never worked for a woman or a person of color and he didn't, he explains, know how to act. He quickly learned—at least according to his happy-ending memoir—that he was no better than her, that race didn't matter. He confronts his close-minded, intolerant past. After slinging coffee with a number of young, baggy-pants-wearing African American men, he realizes that they too know something, that they aren't all bad, and that they can perform on the job. Starbucks' diversity saved his life, he says, making him a spiritually-richer and morally-better person. Gill, it seems, isn't alone in valuing the diversity that can be consumed at Starbucks.

Over the last few years, documentarian Andrei Kirilenko has been making a film about a single Starbucks store in Bethesda, Maryland. Several of his informants told him that they liked going to that outlet because they met different kinds of people there, both in line and behind the counter. “We love the diversity of that particular Starbucks and the nifty energy you feel the moment you step through the door,” a downtown worker said about the Starbucks at 23^rd and Jackson in Seattle where Howard Schultz regularly took visiting journalists. She continued, “It's a melting pot bubbling with lively conversation and diverse backgrounds and outlooks” (Jamieson Reference Jamieson2001).

Over the last twenty years, pronouncements about diversity and the appearance of tolerance have become valued and telling class markers. Creative class types, college-educated, upper-middlebrows value tolerance, and believe in universalism, in the faith that race shouldn't matter in American life anymore. But to show others their allegiance to this creed, race matters. Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson (Reference Anderson2004) noticed this dynamic some time ago when he spent a decade living in a racially mixed, but still divided, network of neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. For many of the Whites he interviewed “contacts” with African Americans “became a yardstick with which to measure one's decency and commitment to liberal social values” (p. 17). Many younger Whites, he detected, assumed that older, working-class Whites were intolerant of Blacks, if not outright racists. Embracing Black people and Black culture, then, distinguished these twentyish liberals from the Archie Bunker types of the old neighborhood. By living near African Americans and by listening to African American music, (note, by the way, how much of the Starbucks soundtrack relies on Black sounds), Whites demonstrated their “closeness” to Blackness and placed themselves, observes Anderson, on the “morally correct side of the continuing struggle for racial equality” (p. 18). Tolerance, Anderson sums up, was the prize. “People looked to tolerance,” he writes, “to be their mark of status. That's what people were judged on. Their openness to not closing themselves off” (p. 20).Footnote ²⁵

In 2006, sociologist Ulrich Beck observed the same kind of thinking about class and race in the United States and parts of Western Europe. He told a reporter from London's Guardian newspaper, “The cosmopolitan model is about acknowledging difference and the dignity of difference” (Jeffries Reference Jeffries2006).Footnote ²⁶

Brian Lowry studies race and psychology. He noted patterns of race not mattering and race mattering in his research as well. All groups, the Stanford University business school professor told me, yearn for a positive self-image. But this is easier said than done. His data show that some persistent anxieties and contradictions lie behind the upper middle-class desire for diversity, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism. In an era where the appearance of colorblindness has tremendous cultural value, most better-educated Whites want to be seen as welcoming and encouraging of racial diversity. Still most, Lowry explained, recognize the lingering inequities of race in America. They would admit that African Americans still face discrimination. Sixty percent of Whites told surveyors that they believed that in a situation where an employer had equally qualified Black and White applicants, he would violate the spirit of colorblind universalism and hire the White candidate. Most thought this was wrong (Hamilton College 1999). But few, Lowry has observed, would acknowledge how the appearance of White skin still matters and eases access to jobs, housing, and education. Many Whites, nonetheless, feel a sense of guilt over continuing racial inequality and apparently how this implicitly challenges their adherence to the ethnos of colorblindness. To relieve this guilt—and get a little innocence from their own benefits of Whiteness—some Whites, Lowry notes, look for ways to “help” African Americans: they donate money to the United Negro College Fund or the NAACP or some other “urban”-based charity; they befriend a Black man or woman or invite a person of color they don't know very well to a party or buy the CDs of African American musicians or cheer for Black athletes.

In recent years, Starbucks has offered its own, convenient and seemingly safe way to gain racial innocence by association—and that is really what is going on here. For starters, there are the UCO stores. Only a few stand in overwhelmingly poor neighborhoods. Most instead hover on the edges of poverty, near universities, or at the heart of gentrifying areas filled with middle-class African Americans and Whites. Fitting this model, there are UCO stores in Chicago's Hyde Park, on Capitol Hill in DC, and next to the University of Southern California in South Central Los Angeles, not places that represent the same urbanity invoked by The Wire or NWA. But Starbucks doesn't call its program with Magic Johnson, “Gentrifying Urban Coffee Opportunities,” does it? Consumers who value diversity can go to one of these Starbucks and listen to blues and jazz, read newspapers stories about the deal between Johnson and Starbucks, and check out posters featuring African coffee growers. That way, buyers get to feel like they are doing something to make the dream of colorblindness come true. Ever better, they dissociate themselves from prejudice and intolerance (from companies like Denny's which, at one point reportedly would not hire African Americans or in some locations would not serve them). Under this logic, you can't be part of the problem if you hang out with African Americans or hang out where they hang out—see, race matters here. By doing this, by Starbucks doing what it does, latte drinkers show to others, but really to themselves, that race doesn't matter. They make an important, both private and public, albeit symbolic, commitment to ending prejudice and fostering a colorblind society. But they do it in a distinctly safe, and not so urban, or even public setting.

While Starbucks draws a somewhat diverse crowd, there really isn't much danger of inter-racial contact at Starbucks. Borrowing sociologist Ray Oldenburg's (Reference Oldenburg1993) phrase for community sites between work and home for vital conversation, Starbucks calls itself in its promotional literature, “a third place.” But on the ground and up-close, Starbucks operates more like a private space than a public space. Close to three-quarters of all customers get their drinks to go (or through the drive thru). Based on hundreds of hours of observations, I found that the customers in the stores are generally either sitting alone buried behind a laptop or conducting meetings with people they already know. In other words, strangers share a space at Starbucks without having the kinds of on-going interactions Oldenburg sees as necessary for forming a genuine third place. So in the end the mixed-race character and clientele of the Seattle-based corporate coffeehouses doesn't mean mixed-race conversations.Footnote ²⁷

*****

Symbol Lai has a razor sharp mind and for four years she trained it on Starbucks. While majoring in Asian and American Studies at Temple University, she worked behind the Starbucks counter serving coffee in Haddonfield, a leafy, affluent, largely White, South Jersey suburb of Philadelphia. We had talked a number of times when one day she asked me a bit sheepishly, “Have you noticed that over the last few years, Starbucks has gotten … hmm … you know … Blacker?”

“What do you mean?” I responded.

“Well, now they play Jill Scott and The Roots a lot. And then the movie.”

The movie Symbol was talking about was Akeelah and the Bee, Starbucks' “first feature film partnership.” The company put a lot of money—and therefore thought and commitment surely with the hope of a financial return—into the movie's promotion. Clearly this story of an African American pre-teen from riot-torn South Central Los Angeles and her “quest to reach the National Spelling Bee finals” was something the coffee company wanted to be associated with. Asked about the movie, Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks' entertainment division, said, “When we saw Akeelah and the Bee we immediately realized that it was a perfect choice for our first film selection. The film's inspirational message about a community coming together to support one of its own aligns directly with Starbucks values” (Starbucks 2006). Again, the race doesn't matter, race matters dynamic that underlies the very ideas of innocence by association and colorblind performance got put in motion here. Starbucks representatives avoided talking about race even though the film revolved around African American characters and the larger realities of life in underserved, poverty-ridden corners of the nation inhabited almost entirely by people of color. In the promotional literature Starbucks sent directly to Symbol's house—they wanted workers to talk about the movie with customers in the stores—the company said it hoped that the story would “change the world one word at a time.” While it flopped at the box office, it did further align Starbucks with African American audiences and, in coded ways, with urban people and even more importantly with creative-class desires to be seen as colorblind or at least as not part of the problem (Starbucks 2006).

After talking about Akeelah and the Bee, Symbol brought up the relationship between some of the White customers in her store and her manager, Greg, an athletic, thirty-ish, African American man. “These guys come into the store every morning and they call out, ‘hey G-Man, yo G-Dog, what up?’” Sometimes, she said rolling her eyes, they grab his hand and smash their forearms into his chest like NBA players do. When they had extra tickets for ball games, they invited him as their guest. “It is like they get a Black friend, well sort of, out of it,” she guessed, adding “Weird.”

Without interviewing Symbol or reading Elijah Anderson's books or Brian Lowry's articles, Starbucks, it seems, understands the appeal of diversity—really, race matters—in its musical picks, film programming, and staffing. They understand, to put this another way, the desire for a colorblind appearance. However much the nation has changed and removed the formal mechanisms of Jim Crow separation, middle- and upper-middle class Whites Americans remain concentrated in White suburbs and White sections of cities. Not everyone, then, can—or wants—to live in a diverse neighborhood. Many, in fact, spend a lot of money to send their kids to top-flight schools in areas that are hardly diverse—certainly not in economic terms—and are certainly insulated from the problems of the inner-city.Footnote ²⁸ Still some feel guilty about the disconnect between their professed values of colorblindness and their actual day-to-day lives in essentially segregated sub-divisions, schools with only token integration, devotion at lily-White churches and synagogues, and patronage of cafés where strangers don't say much of anything to each other. Again, however, many college-educated salesmen, stay-at-home moms, and web designers want to be, or appear to be, tolerant. But if you live in a monochromatic world, how can you “dissociate,” as Hoover Institute fellow Shelby Steele (Reference Steele2006) labels this persistent neo-Myrdalian White concern, from racism? How can you appear tolerant? You can vote for an African American presidential candidate. You can eat at a “real” Mexican or Vietnamese restaurant or listen to “real” African American music, see an African American movie, or go to a store, a Starbucks, where people of color sip expensive coffee or work in management positions. Once again diversity carries with it symbolic value to some White customers.

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (Reference Gladwell2005) talks about instant decision-making. He uses race thinking as an example. He argues that some Whites see African Americans, especially young Black men, and in a blink make a slew of negative assumptions. But for some—for those who value tolerance and want to dissociate themselves from prejudice—they blink sometimes in a different way. They might walk into a store or restaurant and see a few African Africans and Latinos sitting there and feel good about themselves. As a result of their diversity, these places gain value. Just being in a mixed-race setting validates the purchaser and her/his personal politics of inclusion—just like voting for Bararck Obama can. So, in a sense, Starbucks' proactive diversity policies, which get minorities in the door, produce an added pay-off for the company and its customers. Not only do these moves expand Starbucks' customer base, but the presence of others makes some Whites feel more tolerant, more cosmopolitan, and better about themselves, especially compared to what they see as the more narrow-minded working class, or in the context of 2008, Hilary Clinton or John McCain supporters. Still with its fitted filters of relatively up-scale locations and high prices, few Starbucks risk—thinking of another of Gladwell's (Reference Gladwell2000) clever books—going over the tipping point. Not many stores are in danger of filling up with too many young Black men mouthing 50-Cent lyrics—too many, that is, for most Whites. So Whites can, at Starbucks, drink coffee in a seemingly integrated setting. But Starbucks rarely gets too integrated. What's more, it is not just that the stores don't attract too many ‘others’, but that Whites and Blacks can see each other there, as pointed out earlier, without having to have coffee together. This might explain, Elijah Anderson speculated when we talked, why Starbucks fits so perfectly with the desires of some Whites. “Whites just like looking at Black people. We fascinate them,” he told me. Even if White customers don't interact with the African Americans around them at Starbucks, they will still reward themselves with “tolerance points,” Anderson maintained, for just being near people of color.

For some, even this limited contact is not available, so Starbucks offers—if someone wants to use the company's narratives this way—a more vicarious form of association. You can buy its products, products that bring good coffee, decent jobs, and national chains—the advertised benefits of the Magic Johnson stores and coffee purchases in Africa—to the inner city and the world's poorest regions. Just by consuming the coffee sold by this company that insists that it treats all people regardless of race (or sexual orientation) decently, you get a small tolerance dividend and a dose of colorblind innocence. If the product you buy puts stores in underserved neighborhoods and hires people of color, then it practices colorblindness and by implication, so do you. Following along with what Shelby Steele (Reference Steele2006) observed, buying from a firm actively engaged in tolerance allows you to dissociate yourself somewhat from the practice of prejudice. You are innocent by association in this moment of neoliberal, civic retreat.

Again, for many Whites, coming of age in the long wake of the rights struggles of the 1960s, tolerance has social value. To be seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitan—two highly prized attributes in high education circles, according again to Richard Florida—is to be seen as valuing diversity and difference. Tolerance, then, translates into social status and class standing. In the minds of the well educated, only the ignorant, uneducated, and less well informed discriminate against others. This was how Archie Bunker and Don Imus talked and acted. Buying products associated with diversity, like Starbucks, creates the highly valued appearance of good intentions and cosmopolitanism. Gaining that appearance of colorblindness—just like an appearance of caring about the environment or the AIDS crisis—is worth paying a premium for, like four dollars for an extra large, venti latte.

By talking about doing good, Starbucks allowed something else to happen. Customers buy Starbucks to say something about themselves, to say that they, like the company, are tolerant and caring; that they are good colorblind people, really better people than those who consume more ordinary products. Buying, in this case like so many critics and scholars from Pierre Bordieu (Reference Bordieu1984) to Grant McCracken (Reference McCracken1988) to John Fiske (Reference Fiske1989) to Don Slater (Reference Slater1977) to Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (Reference Douglas and Isherwood1979) have argued, serves as performance of self and as yet another means for sorting out people largely along status lines. But this isn't just about traditional forms of conspicuous consumption. In this economic moment where you are what you buy, and where political life and discourse have lost much of their vibrancy, it is even more about showing how you think. You can't be a member of the Creative Class—and who wants to be a member of the un-Creative Class?—if you don't care about diversity.

By telling people that it is making a difference, Starbucks allows customers, moreover, if they want, to wash their hands of the problem and perpetuate the privatization of policy. This, again, is how colorblindness and innocence by association work in malled-up, buying-can-save-us, government-can't-solve-the problem, post-Civil Rights America. There can't be a race problem if discrimination is outlawed and big-hearted companies welcome everyone through their doors. And you can't be racist if you shop at these stores. While it gives consumers a chance to show how they think, buying symbolic diversity makes finding a concrete solution to the enduring problems of race in America harder to see and even harder to identify. In a sense, it consumes politics. Sure, you can vote for Obama, and maybe that's enough. But why join in a long-term political crusade if you are already doing something on this front, each and every day, like buying coffee from a company that says race doesn't matter? Once again, consumption doesn't solve things; in fact, it has a tendency to make real solutions harder to see. Even more, it takes away a sense of urgency. Because of their purchases people feel less of a sense of guilt. That's what some pay the premium for, so that's what Starbucks gives them, the illusion of fixing something broken.Footnote ²⁹

Diversity and the appearance of colorblindness certainly have value—and this might help to explain, along with other reasons, the legions of White, middle-class Obama backers. But this might also help to explain why some voters, including upper-middle-class suburbanites in state races in Virginia and Massachusetts were so quick to abandon Obama's side in 2009 and 2010. Obama had promised hope, change, something new. When this didn't happen fast enough or the exactly the way some wanted it to happen, these voters moved on to another candidate—another product, really.Footnote ³⁰ The consumer-as-citizen model might also suggest the ultimate fragility of the race doesn't matter, race matters paradigm. Starbucks, like most candidates, can't sell its racial values too loudly or vociferously and hold on to its customers' desire for a performance of colorblindness. Stressing structural racism transforms race and makes it a systemic problem rather than a personal one. Too much discussion of urban poverty—that very nameless problem—risks tipping the precarious balance on the race doesn't matter, race matters scale. By talking about race too much, it would make it seem like race does matter, and that might not sit so well with some of Starbucks' (and Obama's) race doesn't matter customers, not in the coffee house or on the campaign trail.

Off stage, Starbucks talked about, and really acted on, race in 2008. That summer, the company announced plans to close 600 U.S. stores, representing about eight percent of its U.S. outlets. Of the stores that were slated for extinction, more than fifteen percent were Urban Coffee Opportunity stores.Footnote ³¹ In the end, Starbucks said—quietly—that it really was all about the money. Maybe race didn't matter in the end, but neither did diversity.